Anyone want to give me 3 million dollars so I can turn this church into an event hall/maker space. Please please please please please! I'll let you be the one to rip the burlap off the walls!
The book of Mormon becomes infinitely more fun to interact with when viewed as mythology. I want to play with it like Playdough. Subvert themes and take apart the morals. How many times have the stories of The Odyssey, King Arthur, Shakespeare been retold? Each retelling is influenced by the ideas and morals of the writer and time period. And i LOVE THAT. I love the way stories change!!!
Anyway...
Nephi needs to learn to not listen to the little voice inside his head that says its OK to not follow certain commandments. Thou Shalt Not Kill is kinda important. And I have more I could say about this but what I wrote out started to get a bit dark and I'd rather get to the punch line of this post which is:
Got a lot on my mind right now, but I wanna talk a little bit about Helmuth Hübener.
Helmuth Hübener - Wikipedia
Helmuth is best known to history as the youngest member of the German antifascist resistance to be executed by the Nazi regime — after a coworker ratted him out for composing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, Helmuth was convicted of high treason, stripped of his civil rights, tortured in prison, and finally beheaded at the age of seventeen. Nowadays, Helmuth is remembered as a hero for not just resisting the Nazis, but for purposely drawing their ire during his trial in a successful effort to spare his two best friends from being executed alongside him.
One important thing to know about Helmuth was his religious denomination: in addition to being a literal Boy Scout, Helmuth was a devout Mormon, and a lot of his radicalization against the Nazis can be directly attributed to his faith. While Helmuth was required by law to join the Hitler Youth, he quit the organization entirely after the events of Kristallnacht in 1938; when his local church banned Jews from attending, Helmuth and his friends radicalized even further in support of their Jewish neighbors. By caring for those around him, and showing a firm dedication to the truth, Helmuth showed himself to be a truly good person.
But was he a good Mormon? Well, that’s complicated.
Mormonism is a sect of Christianity that teaches not just religious tolerance as a core value, but that God’s greatest gift to humanity was the power of personal agency, and the capacity to discern between right and wrong. Upon applying those principles to the world around him, Helmuth realized that the truth behind antisemitism was to render the German people “spineless puppets” that would do the bidding of those in power. Even those that remained merely neutral to the Nazi regime were tools for the elites to utilize — though Helmuth estimated that just seven of the region’s two thousand Mormons were outright supportive of the Nazi party, those seven Mormon Nazis were able to do a lot of harm because not enough people bothered to push back against them.
Indeed, the local Mormon population had been advised to do quite the opposite: when LDS prophet Heber J Grant visited Germany in 1937, he advised the local Mormons to “obey the law of the land”, out of fear that they may draw Hitler’s ire if they rocked the boat too much. As such, Hübener and his friends were perceived as dangerous rabble-rousers for speaking out against the Nazis, even if much of the local Mormon population may have privately disagreed with the Third Reich. After Helmuth’s arrest, Mormon branch president Arthur Zander (a proud Nazi supporter who had banned Jews from entering LDS meetinghouses) bragged about excommunicating Helmuth from the church for his crimes; while Helmuth’s membership was retroactively and posthumously reinstated after the fall of the Nazi Regime, it is worth noting that the decision was not only highly unorthodox for the time, but also went publicly unchallenged by much of the local church leadership until after they believed they could oppose the Nazis without consequence.
As someone who was raised Mormon, I remember Helmuth Hübener being held up as a symbol of what a good Mormon was: someone who was brave, kind-hearted, and willing to stand against evil even when he would be left standing alone. But as I got older and read about the circumstances behind his case, I had a chilling realization: Helmuth was only a good Mormon in hindsight. Helmuth refused to respect authority, insisted on rocking the boat, and was ultimately executed for refusing to back down from his beliefs. By the standards of his day, Helmuth was a very bad Mormon, one bad enough to be excommunicated from his religion; in comparison, Arthur Zander the Nazi was a good Mormon, one who respected the law of the land, and who was willing to defend his faith from dangerous upstarts like Helmuth that threatened its sanctity.
Of course, this isn’t exactly the only time this has happened in humanity’s history: very few heroes are recognized as such in their own time. After all, Jesus himself was executed on grounds of terrorism, thanks in no small part to his destruction of a sacred temple’s marketplace.
I’m gonna take a slight segue for a bit, but I promise this is relevant. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Lehi recounts to his family a vision of the Tree of Life, a spiritual construct that grants perfect knowledge to any that consume its fruit. In the vision, the path to the Tree is treacherous, and the only surefire way to reach it is by holding fast to a great iron handrail. During their travels, those that seek the Tree of Life are mocked by the inhabitants of what Lehi describes as “a great and spacious building”; said inhabitants revel in self-righteous luxury, and taunt the journeyers in an effort to entice them to enter the building.
Growing up Mormon in the state of Idaho, I remember often being taught that the great and spacious building represented the temptations of the World, and that we must learn to reject its clarion call to focus solely on that iron rod. But as I got older, I started to notice that most of the mockery and taunting I heard about my beliefs came from other Mormons — not all of the other Mormons, mind you, but enough of them. There was a culture of self-reliance there that had slowly shifted into self-assuredness, with folks so confident in their own faith that they knew to deflect any thoughts that may shake what they believed to be true. They were good Mormons, and good Mormons don’t rock their own boats. After all those years of fearing those in the great and spacious building, very few of us had considered the possibility that we were already comfortably living inside of it.
So do I think Helmut Hübener was a bad Mormon? No, I don’t. But I also don’t think he was a good Mormon, either. I think he was a good person that happened to be a Mormon, and that Arthur Zander was a bad person who happened to be a Mormon. That’s not to say that their religion didn’t matter, though — rather, I believe that the lesson here is that religious affiliation by itself is a neutral trait. Organized religion is a vessel for faith, but we are the ones who choose how it shapes us.
There is not a single religion on this Earth that will make you a good person just by belonging to it, or one that can justify and absolve every action you commit in its name — if your religion says that is the case, then I’d highly recommend looking at it with a more critical eye. There are very good people in this world who are Christian, and there are very bad people who are Christian as well. The same is true for Muslims, Jews, Hindis, Buddhists, atheists, Sikhs, Scientologists, Wiccans, Pastafarians, and even Mormons, not to mention every other religion and non-religion I didn’t rattle off there. And on a much more serious note, believe me when I say that there will never be a religion so good and true, nor a people’s suffering so great, that a genocide can be justified. I was raised Mormon, and I know our history: the early Mormons were driven into the American West via an extermination order placed against them by the US government, only for a wicked man to exploit their fears and convince them to exterminate and enslave others in turn. Believing that your situation is unique is a surefire way to ensure that you make the exact same mistakes that echo throughout human history.
If I learned anything from Helmuth Hübener, it’s that it is not enough to merely politely disagree with evil when it’s safe to do so — evil must be fought actively, and openly recognized for the danger that it is. To misquote Edmund Burke, “the only thing needed for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Helmut may have died, but he died fighting to do something good. So what about us? Have we done any good in the world today? Because if not… let’s get on that, and damn the consequences of rocking the boat. I’d rather die as a good person like Helmuth, than live as a good puppet like Zander. Wouldn’t you?
2 hours... I was stuck listening to her for 2 hours.
Emotionally I'm fine. I didn't give a shit what she'd have to say about it. I was ready to burn bridges. Mentally I am in hell. And probably spiritually in hell as well. After all, It IS the internet's and the devil's fault I'm trans.
Thinking about the women in relief society who were so excited to learn about my identity when I started wearing suits to church. I hope they're thinking about me too.
One thing they don't tell you about being a Mormon in Utah is that you absolutely always have to lock your car on Sunday because if you don't a "Good Ward Member" might do a "good deed" and put some zucchini in there and then you gotta spend the next two weeks making zucchini bread and fried zucchini and every other zucchini recipe under the sun.
for those who aren't familiar with it, it's a possibly-spurious quote by alan shepard (and is thus sometimes referred to as the shepard's prayer) on the launchpad of Freedom 7, immediately before he became the first american in space. it goes like this:
im not particularly religious but i think it’s very cute that Trans Day of Visibility and Easter are on the same day this year :)
its no question that something like this could be triggering or upsetting to a number of queer ppl given the current sociopolitical climate, so i want everyone to remember that u are loved! Regardless of what u or others believe, there are ppl who will love and support you always. Give yourself patience and treat yourself with care!!!
happy and peaceful TDOV everyone!! And Easter to those who celebrate :D
i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.
Hey folks who are observing Advent this year, the patriarchs and bishops of Jerusalem have put out a statement to Christians across the world that I recommend reading. I also invite you to join in extra prayer and almsgiving and (if it’s safe for you) fasting in the lead up to Christmas this year. Feel free to DM me if you want to talk about any or all of those. Preparing for the feast of the Incarnation is a good opportunity to ground ourselves in the humanity of all people and to offer what we can towards the hope of a lasting and life-giving peace. Blessings to y'all in this season.
Regular Guy on My Shoulder: You’ve been understaffed at work for six months, literally you need twice the team you have, you need to slow down so you don’t burn out.
Mormon on My Shoulder: Put your shoulder to the wheel and do even more to compensate. It is always morally correct to serve your superiors with your entire soul. God smiles when you toil.
Regular Guy: Don’t you do it
Mormon:
Nice try, Satan @bittersweet-green-jello - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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